We asked on Twitter for your childhood memories of encounters in nature, and you certainly delivered! Thank you everyone for sharing beautiful words and the images they conjured – you can read the stories below.
If you’d like to spend a couple of hours experimenting with nature writing, join nature expert and author Stephen Moss for his Live Online masterclass on September 11th:
Capturing the Moment: Nature Writing with Stephen Moss
Twitter stories: childhood encounters with nature
From Simon @SimonSalento:
It would be inaccurate to say
I remember chalk springs
and water meadows.
Memory implies they no longer live inside me,
shaping my future,
the clarity of the water chilling my bones.
I can never forget them
or the colour of the foliage
or the too soon long walk home.
From EmilyWrites @emilywritesit:
Anticipation for the forage carries the girl along the path from the house on Berry Lane. If the expedition meets expectations–and this spot has yet to fail them–they will see out the day at the back of the house, steaming the kitchen windows as they work with their pickings. The girl thinks of her grandad drinking coffee in the fading light of the garden…the Pyrex dish on the stove, three apples waiting for the peeler. Her freezer bag does not fasten, and her white cotton t-shirt is stained a deep purple. They chose a good day for blackberrying.
From Anna Wilson @acwilsonwriter:
Swimming with dolphins one morning when the kids were small and got up at an ungodly hour. Swimming with a seal chasing my toes across the bay when I was alone and sad. Swimming with a kingfisher skimming the surface of the river as I mourned Dad’s passing.
From Anna Chorlton @anna_chorlton:
Tiny Naturalist
Puppy fingers reach
clamping jagged rock,
knees rub weed rugs.
Like a sea snail rolling her shell
she crawls to a pool of slate blue,
thumbs in dipping,
a heart busting smile.
Hands lift away to cliffs,
a sea pink at her nose.
From Hanne Larsson @HanneLarsson:
We would walk for hours – mum, and I, in a stooped shuffle – hunting for the fleeting gold of chanterelles, promising each other that round this bend would be the final pickings before home. It never ever was. Only pelting rain changed our minds.
From Eloise Birnam-Wood @birnamwoodprint:
The magpies arrived long before the spring, haunting the grey garden. They appeared whenever important business was underway indoors, their rattle cracking the polite silence. Over time the human residents began to understand their presence as talismanic: here live Sorrow and Joy.
From Rachel Newsome @RachelENewsome:
spending hours making a den from branches (the walls) & ferns (the carpet), only for it to erupt in a black cloud of wings as the swarm of wasps whose nest I had disturbed covered me in stings, leaving me howling and in awe in a way that I had not been before.
From Peter Arnott @PeterArnottGlas:
Me and my brother and my friends were playing “Star Trek” in the disused slate quarry opposite our house. We were about to move up in the world and nature was about to be something we had in the garden, not a thing growing through unusable stones. I was Mr Spock.